Announcements about news from projects I am working on. The blog is targeted to HW/SW development, ham radio and others.

pátek 18. září 2015

How to get Chinese 2.4 TFT LCD ILI9341 based Arduino Uno shield working

These Chinese Arduino Uno TFT LCD shields are neat and very cheap, so I couldn't resist and got one from Banggood. As with nearly everything Chinese, there are several versions and revisions around and it's usually surprise which one you will recieve. It seems my shield came with ILI9341 controller although there is written ILI9340 on the board (I didn't disassemble it, but I assume it according to the shield behaviour). I tried to get it working with Adafruit TFTLCD-Library, but it ended with "Unknown LCD driver chip: C0C0" and white screen. So I dug a bit deep into this problem. It quickly turned out that the chip needs a bit longer delay for reset to start responding. For my shield it seems that additional 5 milliseconds are enough. Then it correctly identified itself as ILI9341. But it still didn't display anything, there was only the whitescreen.

I read both ILI9340 and ILI9341 datasheets and found out that my chip has extended registers which are not handled by the original code. I verified content of these registers with the datasheet and it revealed that the "Pump ratio control" register is set to 0x0 after the reset. According to the datasheet this is 'reserved' value and after the reset the content of this register should be set to 0x20 (which means 2xVCI). Maybe my chip revision is newer than my datasheet or maybe this is some HW glitch but this again validated the basic rule known to embedded developers: "never ever rely on the default values after the reset". So I added initialization for the extended registers. I also improved chip select (CS) handling in the code which allows sharing of the data ports with other peripherals. I did some other minor improvements and bug fixes to the code. All of the changes should be harmless to older HW. Even the initialization of the extended registers should work on chips without extended registers, because according to the datasheet, such initialization should be handled as NOP commands. I pull requested the changes to Adafruit, there is the direct link to the related commit. It seems the shield has different orientation of the display than the Adafruit library expects, thus you need to uncomment #define ILI9341_MIRROR_X 1 and comment #define ILI9341_MIRROR_Y 1 in Adafruit_TFTLCD.h to fix the orientation.

Regarding the touchscreen it's classic 4 wire resistive digitizer which can be handled by e.g. Adafruit TouchScreen library. The only thing that you need to setup is which pins the touchscreen is connected to. Unfortunately it is not written on the kit, but it's possible to locate the connections visually and with the multimeter. The wiring of my shield is following:

A1

Y+

A2

X-

D6

X+

D7

Y-

Unfortunately my shield came with broken electrode, so my touchscreen didn't work, but I checked the correct functionality of the code on my friend's shield. I was refunded by Banggood without problems, so I ordered another shield and will keep this broken shield for projects that do not require touchscreen. You can see the detail of the broken electrode here:

There is picture of the working shield kindly lent me by my friend:

I downloaded the code for this simple painting application somewhere on the internet and modified it to work with my shield. The modified code is available for download. There was no licensing information in the original code, so hopefully the license status of this code is OK (free/public domain). If not, please let me know. In the application you can draw by your stylus/finger, select colors on the side and clear the display by tapping on the opposite display side.

Update 2015/10/07I received replacement display and the shipment was pretty fast. This time there is written ILI9341 on the PCB. It again proved that the development runs pretty fast in China and they usually finish new iteration sooner than you receive your previous order. The display works correctly now. But it seems the digitizer X/Y pins are reversed in comparison with the previous display. I am not sure whether it is wanted feature of the new PCB or bug, but it doesn't matter. The digitizer wiring is now following: